RAW COPY

DISABILITY: IN

PROCURE ACCESS BUILDING BLOCK
SERIES

SEPTEMBER 26TH, 2023
11:00 AM TO 12:00 PM CST

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This text, document, or file is based on live transcription.  Communication Access Realtime Translation (CART), captioning, and/or live transcription are provided in order to facilitate communication accessibility and may not be a totally verbatim record of the proceedings.  This text, document, or file is not to be distributed or used in any way that may violate copyright law.

>> JASON:  Hello, and welcome, everyone to the Procure Access building block series prioritize remediation of existing software.  My name is Jason Stewart.  
     On today's webinar you will of a conversation with Disability:IN.  Our host today is Kara Zirkle, product manager, education and consulting at Dell and our Fireside Chat guest is Stephen Dekat, senior accessibility solutions architect at T‑Mobile.
      Before we begin anyone who cannot see the screen or video, I'll be running through a PowerPoint slide as part of our webinar items.
      As an attendee you're in view only mode meaning you may watch the presentation and participate in the moderated Q & A.  You cannot share audio or video, so please feel free to submit your questions for our panel in the Q & A box any time during the conversation.
      They will do their best to address all questions either throughout or at the end the webinar.  This webinar is being recorded just the Fireside Chat component.  You may access the webinar on the Procure Access site later this week.  
      ASL and live captioning are both being provided during today's webinar.  To start viewing the captioning, simply select the closed captioning icon in the meeting controls.  Feel free to click and drag the closed captioning box to move its position in the meeting window.  We will also post a Streamtext link in the chat.  Our ASL interpreter videos will be spotlighted for the duration of the webinar.  Also, feel free to pin the interpreters.
      If you need any assistance during the webinar, please feel free to reach out to me directly through the Q & A or via email at Jason@DI, and now we will watch a brief video.  
(Video being played.) 
>> Cold air 
>> KARA:  Thank you for being able to attend.  As again my name is Kara Zirkle.  I'm the PM of education, the center of excellence ‑‑ 
>> OPERATOR:  Recording in progress.
>> KARA:  So I'm have had 20 years' experience in accessibility and one of my favorite topics of accessibility is accessible procurement.  Why?  Because very few things are black and white when it comes to accessibility, but procurement creates a process.  There's timelines and things in place and helping you to be able to see a line drawn in the sand from when you start.  With that I want to hear more.  Jason Stewart is here with us.  Stephen ‑‑
>> I think you were meaning to have Stephen introduce himself.
>> KARA:  Yes, my apologies, Stephen.  
>> STEPHEN:  No problem at all my name is Stephen Dekat I'm T‑Mobile solutions architect in the accessibility space.  I have been working in if accessibility for close to 15 years now and living with it my entire life.  
      I'm very, very ‑‑ very, very happy to be here today and talk with you all.
>> KARA:  All right.  Great, thank you, Stephen.  My apologies.
     So really to kind of just kick this off and get started 'cause if you can't tell Stephen, and I can really geek about this just about all along, so we want to get into it.  Procurement is so large.  Stephen, how did you guys figure out where to take a first bite of the element?  
>> STEPHEN:  That's an answer for us that spans years, so I'm ‑‑ I promise I'm going to be as concise as possible with this.
      I'm going to utter three words here that I know some folks might find scandalous from a professional, but they're a recurring thing at least from the work I've done in this space.  We figured where to take the first bite through trial and error.
      A lot of companies spend time to accessibility issues as well, T‑Mobile wasn't any different.  We started out knowing that there was accessibility work to be done in our procurement process because we were people spend a lot of time going from reactive to proactive, and being reactive is not an ideal state to be, and I don't disagree with that, but there's only days that you can do what you can do.  Reactive is still doing something instead of nothing and just, so we're clear, we didn't stop reacting even after we pivoted to being proactive.  We just spent a little bit ‑‑ a little less time being reactive now.  
      In our case we were able to start making that shift from being reactive to proactive when a few things hit critical mass.  The biggest by far was the resources at our disposal.  A senior manager of the Accessibility Resource Center, the team that I'm very fortunate enough to work with had been doing a lot what we all hope to do when we're not putting out fires:  Cultivating relationships, knocking on doors, educating people.  
      The ARC finally grew to the point where we had enough expertise and enough cycles at our disposal that we could start looking at being proactive ‑‑ proactive.  We already knew what problem we were trying to solve.  We kept hiring vendors who couldn't deliver accessible content or vendors who couldn't provide contractors capable of providing accessible content.  Procurement seemed like the obvious solution for that problem but a company as large as T‑Mobile there's a lot of moving parts than what people would consider a procurement department.  We had no idea how many moving parts were.  We aren't a procurement company at least we weren't back then, and we didn't know, and we decided who to talk to at procurement, and what we really decided was procurement is not just the people who buy things, and a lot of companies ‑‑ there is just an insane amount of work that happens before you put the old credit card down on the table.  That part we knew.  What we didn't really understand was that a lot of it wasn't even being done by the actual procurement team and maybe more frustrating than that, some of the most important decisions that gets made with regard to procuring services from vendors are completely out of procurement's hands.  
      Our friends in procurement explained all of this to us and informed us that there was, in fact, a proverbial village we were going to have to get to know if we wanted to start getting our arms around this issue, so we started getting to know the village.
      In order to keep track of all this, we also started work on the India roadmap ‑‑ NYDA procurement.  From the very first I would like to buy a swing line stapler stage to the point where I got my stapler now what phase it was only come in red now, that's not weird is it?  Some people consider this a lifecycle ‑‑ I'm sure there's other names out there but whatever you call it takes a minute to figure out what happens before a procurement request gets to procurement and what happens after the procurement part is done you got to know what the elephant looks like before you can take your eye off the elephant.
      A good lifecycle document for us contained things, you know, that gave us answers to questions, like:  How do I actually ask procurement to purchase the thing?  And which can I just skip that and purchase that directly?  What are the Forms, what are the checks, what are the balances, et cetera, et cetera that procurement uses to vet your purchase before they allow you to make it.  How much of this vetting involves other teams he outside of procurement?  For example, I'm willing to bet a lot of us can't buy new software and put it on new computers our company probably needs an approval check before you can put it on your software, which is most likely by your IT team not by parties, so if you want to change it you need to talk to IT as well as procurement.  
      Same thing for security, same thing for legal, et cetera, et cetera.  
      Who's writing your company's contract language?  How do you get that language updated?  And who has the final authority over making a procurement decision.  Spoilers sometimes it's procurement.  Sometimes it's not.  
      Every single one of those things has an intersection with accessibility.  The question:  How can I make this part of the process more accessible ‑‑ we tried to direct that question of every single item that we put on our roadmap.  If you're like us, you might not have enough information to create a comprehensive and document it first, and that's fine.  Trial and error write down what you do know, so that you also have a really clear understanding what you don't know.  This was really important for us because when we identified what you're knowledge gaps were inevitably the question to stop questions ‑‑ who can we talk to about learning more?  Once we had that understanding we were able to start prioritizing things and build a much larger scope of what our company's needs were in the Procurement space.  
>> KARA:  Great, thanks, Stephen, and I love how you're using trial and error because a lot of times we have fear in that because we think fear is failure, but when it comes to a lot of when you're saying here ‑‑ you also said getting to know the village, well, that stands true, but it also takes a village to really work on accessibility, and it's a journey that's not going to happen overnight, so that trial and error failure is actually lessons learned, and that's more of the stepping‑stones that we used to really get from place to place so kind of a follow‑up to that, how ‑‑ you know, how did that ‑‑ how did the journey itself help you all into building your software inventory?  
>> STEPHEN:  Oh, gosh!  Understanding where we're coming, having that roadmap of how procurement worked from end‑to‑end I think is going to impact everybody in different ways.  In our case we really didn't start to see the potential synergies between having a roadmap and having an inventory until the initial inventory was mostly constructed just because we were building them both at the same time.  
      In hindsight, we would have done it differently.  But again, trial and error.  
      The inventory process was pretty simple for us.  We're talking about a software inventory here, so we figured the first thing we should do is get to know the people responsible for software.  That's usually going to be the folks over in IT.  Once we identified those people and got some time on their calendars, the inventory kind of built itself almost.  For the most part, our software divided itself organically into a can you feel what we felt were really obvious categories.  
      We had our big rocks our enterprise‑wide software packages, you know, pretty much everybody in the company has to use.  This is the stuff like your productivity suites, the tools that you make your documents in.  The tools you write your emails in.  These are going to be the tools you perform your human resources tasks like managing your employee information and your payroll and timekeeping.  
      A pro tip on that front as you're building your inventory there are absolutely going to be questions are we sure this is software and not website does it belong in inventory?  And the answer is yes.  You can always take things off your list later, but them there while you're in the data‑gathering phase, so you don't to have wonder about them if a question comes up a few weeks later.  If you decide to move them later do yourself another favor, don't remove them.  Just put them in a category with a letter of label out of scope.  I promise you days and days will go by and some of those will wonder consider in the list creation ask me how I know?  It 
      The next major category of software was the stuff that ‑‑ a large portion of our employee base uses but not everybody but for us that was stuff that our realty employees ‑‑ retrial employees use, and it's not common for salespeople to have tools like this.  We tried really hard not to get hung up?  In the right category thing and focused a lot more on actually getting the data written down.
      Last but certainly not least, we had our niche software the stuff, you know, only smaller companies used specialty tools, and it was at this point that our roadmap started knocking on the door, you know, the roadmap is supposed to be helping you accomplish your tasks and there were two really big ones that we already used the roadmap to identify.  We want to use our software inventory to help our company drive accessibility remediation, and we also want to figure out how to avoid the need to remediate things in the first place, which meant getting in front of all the people responsible for all the software and helping them make more accessible procurement decisions in the future.
      Driving these two tasks would mean not just having a list of software but also understanding everything that was happening around that, so I'll have's lifestyle ‑‑ life cycle second verse same as the first your product donor is the software something internal that your company built or was it built by a third‑party?  What's that third‑party's name?  Who's the person has that owns the relationship with that third‑party?  Does the software produce customer‑facing content or internal content or both?
The additional data that we found ourselves seeking was driven directly by the roadmap.  Funny how things work.  Creating the remediation plan was actually pretty easy after that because we'd taken the time to build our inventory correctly.  We split our plan up in three major phases with our software companies your bigger ox and the software used by large groups of employees, and then that third phase is with the leftovers with one very notable exception.  Any piece of software that we already knew was causing accessibility‑related issues for an employee was automatically triaged to the top of the list.  Then we actually started trying to drive remediation that's when the synergies between our inventory and our roadmap just started coming out of the woodwork.  
      Our human resources team had already been working to help accommodate employees with digital accessibility concerns, but they were still looking for ways to engage for the teams to engage the tools themselves.  A working group was stood up jointly between the Accessibility Resource Center and the disability equity and inclusion team which was called cleverly enough called the accessibility working group.  That whole point of that working group was connect with issues employees were having to the team that had the tools.  It ended up being comprised of his product donors we found in the inventory, and we knew those who those were because of the inventory, and we had that information in the inventory because of that roadmap and the subject of all right.  After we plug this leak how do we avoid it happening in the future coming up we already knew where to inject better practices because of the roadmap.  
      We haven't gotten everything fixed yet we're still working on it.  We're going to be working on it for a long time.
      Something that I didn't mention that I was really glad to have you call out in your video our software inventory when we put it together we identified over 2,000 pieces of software that we use at our company, and we know we missed some of them, but we've got a plan, and we're pretty confident because of the roadmap, because of the inventory and because of trial and error, it's a pretty good plan so ‑‑
>> So, you know, I imagine a lot of people right now sending emails to their IT folks, right, asking about inventories or asking about a list of softwares but another question that we often see is, okay.  Now I know I need to hire an accessible vendor, but as we're asking questions we're learning that those vendors don't know about accessibility so how do you bridge that gap without using the resources that you mentioned from yourself T‑Mobile?  
>> STEPHEN:  This is such a meet and potatoes question because the decision to burn resources on a vendor that isn't meeting accessibility standards is frequently a decision made by other people.  When a lot of us start out trying to address the vendors of access and accessibility we absolutely have this golden ideal we want to pursue we're going to stop the problems for these vendors before they start, and then you get in the middle of it all and the reality of the corporate environment hits you, and you're like, wait, I don't actually have control over any of this.  What am I even doing here.
     And I think that can be rough for a lot of people when they come face‑to‑face for the first time, so I do want to establish something for anybody who's ever been at this point, this is normal.  You're not a failure for having arrived at this point even if you've been wrenching on accessibility for years.  
      I think a lot of us need to adjust our definition of success here, but it's going to have the courage and the stamina to get in the middle of this and make the best of it as we can on a day‑to‑day basis.  We want vendors who practice accessibility, and there's steps you can take and at the end of the day you can only do what you can do.  
      As to the vendors who either don't have a program or can't really be bothered to be good partners with the program, I do have a couple of tips.  First, get to know your product owners.  I have absolutely run into situations where the vendor isn't giving you anything because the product owner isn't asking for it and don't misunderstand me I'm not trying to demonize product owners here they've all got their own jobs to do and deadlines to meet and with companies without big enterprise‑wide mandates in this space it's not just unusual for people to really focused on getting their stuff out the door.  That's the nature of your business.  Go meet with your product owners, a.  I've solved a lot of problems by doing this and in the entirety of my career, I have only ever encountered one single vendor who when asked by a product owner to do accessibility refused.  That situation resolved itself exactly the way you think it did.
      In every other instance where a vendor is supposedly not playing ball, it's not the vendor.  It's the business which brings me to my second recommendation.  Learn to get comfortable with the folks in the business.  There's going to be times your company needs what the vendor tops give.  The product owner might not be willing or able to focus on accessibility.  We all have our orders.  It's just not productive to ask somebody to buck theirs or when to stop pushing.  There are going to be times when you simply can't move the needle.  That doesn't mean you can't do anything, though, which brings me to my next subject, which is data, data, data if not leaning to accessibility with a vendor is causing problems, track it.  Get the bloated budget numbers.  If the company is burning resources do what you can to capture that information.  Get the push deadline numbers.  Log it, file it away.  Be prepared to present it to the business after the fact.  You could have saved X time and Y money by doing it my way, but now we're having to burn man hours to make up for this.  
      Ultimately, we are all also resources for the business.  Give the business data that it needs to make intelligent decisions.  This too is a victory.  Live to fight another day.  Persevere.  What was not an option today may be an option tomorrow.  
      And lastly I want to circle those who don't have an accessibility program in place.  I don't always view this as a bad thing.  The majority of vendors that I work with are honestly really interested in accessibility.  They're working towards it.  They just might not be all the way there yet.  These are actually my favorite vendors because if I'm going to burn resources working with a vendor, I prefer it to be these kinds of vendors.  Almost every time they give me back just as much as I give to them.
      Some of my favorite vendors have grown up enough now they're bringing fresh ideas back to us.  Ideas that we never considered on our own.  We're truly collaborating with one another now and better still they're out there helping other vendors that they work with in this space and if that's not a win, I don't know what it is.
>> KARA:  I think another win to that is, you know, a lot of times we might be the first one asking much question, but it's one of those:  When I do talk with a vendor, and I ask that question they're like well, you're the first one that's asked that.  Well, I can promise you I won't be the last, you know, so it's one of those ‑‑ I think somewhere I've heard that, you know, someone has to hear something 7 times before they start to believe it or maybe think of it as their own idea.  
      So, you know, I just encourage everyone that's listening to be able to know ‑‑ it's okay to just ask the question about accessibility.  Is the vendor doing anything about accessibility because if you are the first one, I can promise you you're not the last because these are the things that all of us as vendors are doing all day so one of us at one point in time may have started that journey and have cracked that door open to where it allows more time for another company, the next company to open it up a little bit more till finally we're able to actually walk through it and talk about accessibility with that vendor.
     So I just always want to be able to say, asking the question is really good even if you're the first one because then it actually shows that you're doing a lot about accessibility and where you're making a priority, and then it starts to help that vendor kind of think, oh, okay.  If they're asking, then what do I need to do, so just opening that ‑‑ cracking that door is a really big place a big first step, I think.
      But, you know, another one that I also see when we're talking with vendors and having some of these conversations is 1 a lot of times like you said, we have to start somewhere, and most of the time it's after contracts are already in play because it's time, it's a remediation.  It's roadmapping so to actually catch a vendor at the very beginning of the contract comes with time, so most of the time we see the contracts already in place, and now we're starting to ask those vendors about accessibility that may not have necessarily been scoped as the project.  
      So what are some options there and what do you do if the vendor starts asking for more money to make it accessible?
>> This kind of dovetails into what we were just discussing and since we started out by asking about contracts let's talk about those real quick.  A contract is a piece of paper.  It doesn't do the work.  It doesn't make the roadmaps.  It doesn't meet with your vendors.  It doesn't test things.  It doesn't compel compliance out of a vendor.  That's what people are for.  The point of a contract and really what I've seen it do more than anything it establishes a precedent, but that's really all that it does.  The first thing I usually tell people in situations where ‑‑ all right.  We've got ink and paper but now ‑‑ ink on paper but now we're asking questions about accessibility.  If you haven't already become really good friends with your company's legal team, stop what you're doing and go fix that.
      My team at T‑Mobile is really fortunate to have a really wonderful working relationship with our legal team and no, it's not, so that we can use them to bully people into doing what we want.  
      I think a lot of people forget that we refer to lawyers as counsel for a reason, and that's, obviously, what they are, and that's why I value my relationship with our counsel so highly.  Your legal team can provide you with a great deal wisdom specifically, so you don't have to bully people.  I don't want to bully people.  I want friends.
      Your legal team can provide you with a lot of insight about things, like, you know, what are the vendors' actual obligations in this situation?  And what does your existing contract language that obligate them versus what it doesn't and even things like ‑‑ what's the risk of not pursuing accessibility in your situation?
That third one is is kind of a doozy can because of more than one occasion counsel has put their hand on my shoulder and told me to let it go.  It's their job to have that perspective, and that's a thing sometimes.  I love what I do we all do sometimes we need a little bit more objectivity to spend our efforts on a more productive path.
      One of the other really cool things that council counsel can help you understand we just ask the vendor to sign an updated contract, please.
      I have been shocked how many times we've done this and the vendors were really, really open to it.  A contract with really well‑defined determines is a benefit to them as well, and it can't ever hurt to ask, and, you know, this goes back to what you were saying about ‑‑ crack that door open, ask the first question.  You won't be the last one to ask it, yes, even with your big contracts.  
      T‑Mobile is actively in the process of doing just this, adding additional language to already really significant contracts.  It can happen.
      Something else that we found to be really useful if you're thinking about going back to the table to negotiate a contract.  Is win your own assessment.  It's one thing that we need you to do accessibility.  It's another thing that we need you to do accessibility because your product already has this laundry list of issues with it.  Being able to put that on the table can be really powerful.
      Spending your own resources on an audit shows the vendor that you're serious about this and that you do know what you're talking about, yes, some vendors are not going to be used to being called out on that, so they think they can get away with it, but honestly a lot of vendors that we've run into in situations like this don't think they have to worry about accessibility because they don't think they have any issues with it.  We've run our own audits and shown them he to vendors, and it's led to a really productive relationship.  
      The business of, you know, what do you do if the vendor asks for more money, if you're me you mute yourself, and you turn off your video as quickly as possible solve don't see you put a face, and then you put them on the face of vendors we do not and once you do your little fit, you you go to counsel again brief them on that situation and let them brief you on the risks and report that to the business.  That's your job in this instance.  Make sure the business understands the reality of the situation, make sure they understand that they are most likely going to waste money and that if people choose to do that, write that down too.  Then move on, preserve ‑‑ persevere, excuse me, live to fight another day and do understand when I say report that to the business, I also mean human resources and no, not for that reason.  
      There will be perfectly legitimate times when HR needs to understand that they need to take extra precautions to support an employee if a service or question might not work for an employee with a disability.  Lean into those opportunities.  Make friends with human resources let them know that you support them if they have an accessibility question serving an employee, learn, grow.  The situation is only a failure if you do nothing.  
>> KARA: So we have about 5 minutes left, so we've heard a lot about contacting reaching out to IT for the inventory list, working and making friends with legal counsel and even your business units.  A question for you specifically around T‑Mobile, and then a generalized question based upon, you know, others ‑‑ but do you have executive sponsorship to be able to provide support for all of these things that you're doing?  And if not, how do you get anything successfully accomplished without that executive sponsorship?  
>> STEPHEN:  In the interest of time, I'm going to try to be extra brief here.  
      The shortened version is, yes, we do absolutely have several executive‑level sponsors at T‑Mobile.  Behind accessibility.  We love them, we value them.  We try to maintain a strong relationship with them and show them the benefit of their investment, A, so that they don't forget about us and B, specifically, so that they remember us when it's time to advocate for things like, you know, budget considerations.  
      The question of what to do if you don't have an executive sponsor, how do you get anything done without one?  It I would submit the same way you do with one.  Sponsorship can help grease the skids on conversations, but their first priority is still going to be the business.  A good executive sponsor is going to help you better understand how to align your goals with the goals of the enterprise, but you can do that on your own.  It might take you a little bit of extra work, but you can do it on your own.  
      The other thing that I really encourage people to remember, and this kind of harkens what I said earlier about the village.  Your executive sponsor is going to kind of serving in the same capacity as your contract.  It's a declaration of an intent, but the people are you still the ones that are going to be doing the work, and you're still going to have to go out and make friends with the village.  And figure out how to work with the village even if you got an executive sponsor, so you get things done without one the same things with one.  You get out, and you push.
>> KARA:  So last question before we start going over to any Q & A, and I think this is a really good one for us to kind of ‑‑ to leave on, but:  What do you feel is the biggest concern among procurement and accessibility?  
>> STEPHEN:  I think probably the single biggest thing that springs timely mind ‑‑ two things, but I think the biggest one here is that there's a pretty shocking lack of understanding between accessibility and Procurement teams about what the actual problems are and what realistic solutions to those problems look like.  Contracts are actually a nearly perfect encapsulation of this.  From my perspective accessibility SMEs we're working to have ironclad contracts, so we get what we need out there vendors, and we get frustrated with procurement pushing back to do in various ways that they're known to do, but they're being asked to make an already eye‑twitchingly complex process even longer and more complex, and this is a process if it fails, risks a lot more than just accessibility he.  You are never going to get everything you want put into a contract because of that.  The reality of the situation is that like we've talked about ‑‑ the contract is just a declaration of intent and you've got to solve for the people element.
      I bet you money that if you, and I were doing this right now in an auditorium we could stand up and ask for a show of hands who's ever been told:  We don't want to be responsible for this or we don't have the knowledge or skill‑set for this.  I bet if we asked people to raise their hands if they ever heard this, everybody would be going crazy will this is the part where I'm supposed to tell you that T‑Mobile has cracked this.  We haven't at least not yet.  We're trying something a little new trial and error.  For starters we're spending our money and our energy on updating T‑Mobile standing code of conduct these are the table stake terms that T‑Mobile has that you just need to abide with if you're going to do business with us.  They're not up for debate, and they're going to be posted publicly just like our current code of documents are.
      Some of you might be muttering sophistry what's updating versus a code of conduct?  There's pretty important differences for us.  For starters you don't get to change the code of conduct unless pretty high up the food chain and even then doing so makes a pretty loud noise, and it creates a paper trail and maybe, best of all, it, creates accountability.  Secondly, and this does smack a little bit of, so he is if I.  The contracts are different.  Contracts are designed to be negotiated.  That's how people approach them.  We're not really interested in that, so we're moving it as an option.
      That having been said people still execute these things, and that's kind of good news for us.  People are one of T‑Mobile's greatest strengths.  We have really wonderful people that work at T‑Mobile and because we know that accessibility can be a big scary complicated issue, especially for your product owner who's just trying to get it out the door, we've created a comprehensive walk‑through and frequently asked questions document for all of our employees that talks them through the bite‑size steps that they can take at every single part of the procurement ‑‑ procurement journey.  It's not a guarantee, but we do think it's the next step, and I'm really, really proud to say it's a step that much ‑‑ that we've seen in cooperation not just with our legal team and our procurement team because like us they're just trying to do their jobs.
>> KARA:  Yeah, I think part of what you hit there is ‑‑ it's a people issue; right?  And I think and the biggest concern maybe for a company really starting out as a biggest concern it's getting all the people on the same page and where do you start with that and sometimes that's just simple terminology is making sure your procurement people are teaching the procurement terminology to the accessibility people and the accessibility people teaching their terminology to the legal people, and so on, and so forth and making sure everyone is on the same page because if you can't use the same lingo, then how are you going to move forward with anything else?
, and, you know, that seems very elementary because at the same time because we live in the world every day, we don't always think about:  Oh, do ‑‑ do I know what an RFP is?  Do they know what a VPAT is?  You know, so it does seem simple, but that's really a good starting point sometimes just because people are sometimes the instance that we are having to educate them, and I really like what you talked about of the Q & A, the FAQs around each process around that because if the individuals that are working on it know what they need to do, they can also help incorporate that into the timelines because we all know procurement is:  Let's get things done; right?  It needs to be pushed through.  We have quarterly requirements of budget and if all of a sudden, we throw in accessibility, oh, my goodness.  Everybody is like stop pushing on the brakes now I need to get another requirement in before this timeline.  I'm already behind.
      You know, the biggest concern that I see especially for companies that are really starting out is getting everybody around the same page around that, so that everybody is incorporating accessibility into that procurement.  You're understanding the language, and you're able to be able to speak to it, and you can really start to move things through easier, and I have to say talk to your security folks, too because security had to go through the same exact thing.  It might have been 10 years or more, but they had to go through the exact same thing, so that's also another good ‑‑ you know, use your village.  They've had some trial and error as well.  They might not want to use the term trial and error because it's security, but they had to figure some things out too and accessibility is just behind ‑‑ behind the eight ball on that one, so that's, I think, another great resources to think about.  
      So, Stephen, I think we are at time here, so I want to make sure that we're opening it up for Q & A, so let's see.  Is there any Q & A from anything?  
>> OPERATOR:  Recording stopped.  
>> Yeah, so if anyone has any Q & A questions, please just put them in the Q & A feature.
      Stephen, first can you share a success story or two on how vendors view accessibility as a business differentiator because of how T‑Mobile has placed emphasis on accessibility?  
>> STEPHEN:  Oh, yeah.  I'm really happy that I have several answers to this question.  
      Slam dunk example ‑‑ we ‑‑ we place a lot of emphasis on accessible learning and developing content for our employees and a lot of building that content gets farmed out to vendors.  We absolutely have several vendors that over the course of years we have worked with ‑‑ not just in understanding the tools that we use and the standards that we hold our designers to but in meeting those.
      Over the course of having ‑‑ over the course of having that dialog with them, those vendors have not only now come back and started offering us, you know, new looks at, you know, hey you could actually try presenting your content this way.  I know you guys want to do it like this, but you could do it this way, oh, by the way we know you're really interested in doing this tool, and we ended up doing a little research do you know this tool can do this widget that can do this and, oh, my gosh now you're off to the races.  
      We've been really fortunate to have several vendors that we work with in the learning and development space that ‑‑ that's just the best part of my day when they go from learning, you know, attorney background and giving back to you, and they tell you:  Yeah, this has helped our business model too we are now able to put this front and center in our presentations that we focuses on accessibility.  Every time we see that we see people's faces light up.  Okay I'm good.  I'm going home for the day.  
>> Awesome, another question:  Does the level of testing that you do vary based off of the product number for cost and impact of the software?  
>> STEPHEN:  No.  No.  All it takes is one, and we know we got one.  If I can help one person, you do it.  Them's the rules, and we've communicated that with our testing teams.  We've communicated that with our vendors.  Them's the rules.  If there's one, that's all it takes so, no.  We have ‑‑ we have ‑‑ we have Q & A built into our processes and that Q & A is something that we hold ‑‑ that we hold steady to regardless of what the users are.
>> KARA:  I'll add a little bit to that as well testing, yes, it only takes one individual, but I think it only takes one issue, so if ‑‑ 'cause going back to the question is there a level of testing that you use?  In some past lives we've done just some automated if automated comes up with some issues then you go.  We don't need to do anything more because it is enough to start the conversation.  
      Sometimes it might be something a keyboard test.  Let's face it keyboard accessibility is the biggest issue that we possibly can see that's going to be a No. 1 barrier.
      Very quick easy test, so these are things that you can kind of take and look at based upon your resources your teams and things like that because I think it also just takes one when it comes to an issue, so that's why I would want to add as well.
>> Absolutely, and you're establishing a precedent and anybody knows, you know, when you're trying to integrate into your software development lifecycle, presentation dent, precedent, precedent.  Know there is no wiggle room, and there's not going to be times when you cut this corner or not.  No, you set the precedent up front, and you do the work.  
>> What type of questions do you ask vendors to understand their level of understanding of accessibility?  
>> STEPHEN:  We ‑‑ we actually have a set of control questions baked into that frequently asked questions document that I was talking about.  
      And based on the level ‑‑ based on the level to which we see the vendors' eyes glaze over, we know whether or not we need to push, we knew whether or not we need to push further about it.  I want to know things like if I start ‑‑ if I start talking about WCAG without defining what it is, and I see them kind of looking around at each other, that's a dead give‑away.
      If, you know, we've talked to the vendor beforehand about, hey, we want to get on an accessibility call with you ‑‑ if the vendor shows up and feel don't have somebody from the development team on the call or have somebody on the accessibility team on the call that's another dead give‑away that, you know ‑‑ okay, maybe we need a little bit ‑‑ maybe we need to dig a little bit deeper here.  You know, talk to us about what accessibility means to you and what it means to your company's culture.  Talk to us about how you have folded accessibility into your software delivery lifecycle.
      When you ‑‑ when you ‑‑ when you sat on a couple of these calls, the way that those questions get answered, the people that know the right answer to those questions they will answer them immediately.  They'll be prepared for those questions.  They're like us your accessibility SMEs is going to be excited, oh, my gosh somebody wants to have an accessibility call with me, and they're on the call, and they've got decks and graphs all of, which are accessible.  They want to talk to you about this stuff.
      The ones that are ready they're going to be ready for you.  You can ask those couple of control questions right up front we do and based on how we see them respond to that it's a dead give‑away whether or not we need to be worried.
>> KARA:  Yeah when we're talking about software as well or web‑based applications, asking for a voluntary product accessibility threw the.  D pat for short.  Ask the question in general if the vendor has one and if they don't have a clue of what you're asking or if they say no they don't have one, then that's also kind of a dead give‑away of where they have accessibility in their process.
      Now, it's okay if they have one behind ‑‑ a firewall if they have to send it to you and have it readily available or have it click that gives you a little bit insight for accessibility, but if they don't have a clue or don't have one that's usually a red flag.  
>> STEPHEN:  I agree.
>> One final question ‑‑ can you share a little bit about how your team is structured and who is working on accessibility in the procurement process?  
>> STEPHEN:  Yes.  I ‑‑ accessibility ‑‑ I'm really ‑‑ I'm happy to answer this question too.  Like procurement, accessibility is a village at T‑Mobile as well.
     Obviously, I'm really fortunate and like I said, to work with our Accessibility
Resource Center and our primary focus is on one is perfect accessibility, and we have resources within our DEI.  We have people in our user development teams that think of accessibility and people in our sales teams that are thinking about accessibility and also our wonderful internal legal representatives are thinking about it as well.
      When ‑‑ when questions about procurement come up, it's not uncommon at all to see people from all of the different corners of the company, you know, try to get as many of them on a call at once, so that we can make sure everybody is represented, and we're looking for all those angles.  We've got a number of regularly scheduled check‑in calls with people from the different barts of the company that are wrenching on this, and use of it any other way.  You have to have that perspective.  You have to have that perspective.  You have to have that guidance.  You have to have multiple people causing about it and multiple people spreading, you know ‑‑ spreading the message of this and driving the effort behind it.  Somebody might want to be on PTO one day.  God for bid we take a vacation.  Somebody else can pick it up, and let's be real.  Sometimes there's turnover and if somebody leaves somebody can pick up that Slack yes there's frustrations by having things spread out.  I love our village, and I'm not sure ‑‑ I'm not sure I'd have it any other way at this point.  That may change tomorrow but right now I love our village.  
>> Well, I want to thank you both so much on behalf of the DI family and the disability he community for all the insights that you provided we're so thankful for all that you were able to share.
      I did want to point out that I shared the link to register for the next webinar in the Procure building blocks series test products for accessibility, and we hope you will join us again, and thanks again Kara and Stephen.
>> Great, thanks.  
>> STEPHEN:  Thank you very much for having me.
>> Bye.